El Ranchito, a visual effects company with a quarter of a century of history behind it, deserves a street in Barcelona. Options to get rid of the gazetteer to some inappropriate hero are in abundance. A suggestion is promised later. Calle de El Ranchito number such or that would be a great postal address and, in addition, the company would deserve it not only for the very long list of Goya, Gaudí and Visual Effects Society awards (the latter, something like the Michelin stars of this sector film), but for the priceless work he did to recreate the Barcelona of 1921 in ‘The shadow of the law‘, movie directed by Dani de la Torre in 2018 and released on Netflix. It is a wonderful journey back in time to a time that was erased from the history books of the generations that went to the Francoist schools and to those of at least the first decade of democracy. We were robbed of 1921 and the years immediately preceding and following. Seen this way, does a street deserve or not who, with his trade, has helped to solve that great theft?
In 1921, that violent city like a Chicago, uninhibited like a Berlin and an anarchist like no other
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The one in 1921 was not just any year in Spain, and even less so in Barcelona, then a violent city like Chicago, uninhibited like Berlin and anarchist like no other. Here is a very telegraphic recapitulation of that pandemonium. Pistolerism ended that year more than 100 lives on the streets of Barcelona. Mayor, Antonio Martínez Domingo, He emerged unscathed from an attack on Jaume I street. The president of the Government had less luck in Madrid when he returned home. Eduardo Dato, because he was mortally machine-gunned from a motorcycle with a sidecar by three anarchists who, not without reason, accused him of having put at the head of the Civil Government the most cruel of the civil governors that there have been in Barcelona, Severiano Martínez Anido, a heartless person who is credited with the patent of the leak law, that is, shooting the detainee and then saying that he escaped. 1921 was also the Barcelona of lust, of the legendary lupine of the Arc del Teatre street, Madame Petit, home of the first bidet in Spain, and also the year of those clandestine screenings that were organized to see the pornographic films that Alfonso XIII commissioned the brothers Bathrooms to satiate your Bourbon sexual appetite.
But this telegram would be unacceptably incomplete without a further reference, fundamental in the history of Spain, the Annual disaster, a taboo in the textbooks of several generations. Due to the military inaccuracy of the Army leadership, which quartered troops in North Africa with ammunition to withstand only one day and water for none, more than 13,636 poorly armed soldiers and worse shoes died in a chaotic retreat in a few days. Bad business is running with ‘espardenyes’.
Lieutenant colonel Custer, guilty of the nineteenth-century Pearl Harbor of the United States, was himself Sun Tzu if you compare it with the very general Spanish Wild, who shouted “flee, flee, the coconut is coming”, led to a deadly stampede withdrawal of his troops. The echo of that military debacle was so noisy that it could not be officially silenced, as intended and as it portrays well Of the tower in his movie, starring Luis Tosar. Barcelona, just 12 years earlier, had burned during Setmana Tràgica for not sending its boys to die in northern North Africa for colonial whims and, in its way, the Annual sangria was confirmation of how right those who set fire were to the churches.
Thorough documentation
At that time it has been installed literarily to live on a couple of occasions Eduardo Mendoza, wise and fruitful choice on his part, but 1921, as a narrative site, has been little exploited, much less as happily has been done by ‘The shadow of the law’, that is, using the El Ranchito trade, much more that the Harryhausen Spaniards, because in order to digitally recreate the streets of the city of that time they carried out an almost encyclopedic work of meticulous documentation, piloted by Berta Coderch, it was not that, for example, a model of tram after that date slipped in, or that it was for a couple of years of anachronism. The result is so phenomenal that the movie minutes in which it is possible to visit Barcelona in 1921 should be in the Altaïr bookstore, in the time travel section.
Digital reconstruction from El Ranchito deserves to be on a shelf in the Altaïr bookstore, time travel section
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At the forefront of this recreation has been, among others, Felix Bergés, part of the founding team of El Ranchito. This is a company with a resume that removes hiccups. ‘The Impossible’, ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘The Mandalorian’, ‘Superlópez’ and ‘Jurassic World’ stand out among their several dozen works. They often create imagined worlds. Recreating the reals is not easier, he explains. Bergés, and less in Barcelona. In London, he explains, you can plant the camera and, depending on which streets, you are already in another era. Barcelona is a bit like Paris, which changes its skin as often as snakes. In not a few films, the so-called little streets of the French capital are actually Prague. And in ‘La sombra de la ley’, the industrial patios where the anarchist troubles take place (two years before the action, the Canadian strike gave the world an eight-hour day) are shot in Galicia, because it seems that its little factory past preserves it better than Barcelona. Curious.
Resurrect the old Via Laietana
In ‘La sombra de la ley’, the port of the sheds is flown over, those first works of the Sagrada Família in an Eixample that was a wasteland and, above all, that Chicaguiana Via Laietana from 1921, a headache at the time of being resurrected, because, as Bergés tells us, it was a watchmaker’s job to digitally remove subsequent traffic lights, advertisements, cables and buildings and, thanks to the file provided by Coderch, return to the street its old appearance. In the place where today he rides on the back of a bronze horse, Ramon Berenguer, there was, then, a wonderful drink kiosk like the one that was also in Canaletes. Postcards of a disappeared Barcelona, of which, in Via Laietana, little remains intact. At least, nothing like the Post Office building, a rarity that has been preserved in a drop of amber.
From that 1921, the Spanish Army prefers not to remember the Annual disaster, which is sometimes forgotten, has its corner in the street map of the city
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The options for El Ranchito, as originally proposed, to have a street in the city are, let’s face it, remote. This despite the almost infinite possibilities offered by the current gazetteer. There are streets that go unnoticed. For example, obliquely there are those that pay tribute to that sindiós that was the Annual disaster. This would be the case of Flomesta street, in Sants. The city was dedicated to the artillery lieutenant Diego Flomesta in 1927, in the middle of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, which carried out its coup d’état in 1923, among other reasons, precisely to silence the Annual disaster.
The heroic of Flomesta not discussed. He was the only military man left standing on Mount Abarrán. He was captured by the rebellious rifs and demanded that he teach them how to handle the artillery abandoned and disabled by him before the final assault. He refused and paid for it with his life. Well, at least that tells the Spanish military history, that nobody had there to attest if it was so or if everything is legend. El Ranchito’s heroics, on the other hand, are certified. If you doubt, you know, ‘The Shadow of Power’.
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